Mixing It Up in Middle School: Themed Booklists to Entice Struggling Adolescent Readers

Dana L. Grisham

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Classrooms in the Accelerated Literacy program feature a class size of 20 or fewer students. The teachers for these classes are selected by site administrators and are teamed with Accelerated Literacy Support Teachers (ALSTs) selected by the partnership. The support teachers are involved in a university literacy program to obtain the state-sanctioned reading certificate. University courses were planned and taught cooperatively by university professors and district literacy leaders around the Blueprint for Literacy and California state standards for the certificate. An ALST joined a classroom teacher for a three-hour literacy block, during which he or she worked on literacy skills with individual students, pairs, and small groups, so that the children would be able to join and be successful in regular classrooms at the next grade level. Preliminary data from the evaluation of the program indicate that substantial growth in student literacy achievement has occurred.

As part of this intervention program, 16 ALSTs attended university courses throughout the year. One of the final courses in the sequence was a children’s and adolescent literature class, in which teachers immersed themselves in reading and responding to a variety of texts that reflected the diversity of cultures and peoples in our world. An important part of the class involved exploration of the uses of literature in the classroom and linked teaching strategies with California’s English language arts content standards.

The class was team-taught. My colleague, Barbara Baron, a library/media specialist at SDUSD, and I worked diligently to make the course relevant to our highly motivated students. One of assignments that we planned was for the 16 ALSTs to create a themed booklist that would appeal to their sixth- and seventh-grade students, all of whom were reading at least two grade levels below others in their age group in the regular district classrooms.

Themed Booklists

Because the students in the Accelerated Literacy classrooms are reading far below grade level, the ALSTs were faced with finding “leveled” materials to use in reading instruction. At present, the district is using the leveling scheme devised by Fountas and Pinnell (1999). In the children’s literature course, we discussed the pros and cons of leveling books for adolescent readers, and the ALSTs used or ignored the leveling requirement based on their own professional judgment.

Since these caring teachers were working full time while pursuing a demanding university course load, Barbara and I wanted their assignments to be relevant and useful to them. The themed booklist represented a way for ALSTs to identify resources that were directly applicable to their Accelerated Literacy students’ strengths and needs, as well as being relevant to the middle school content curriculum and congruent with the teachers’ own interests. The ALSTs could choose one of two ways to assemble the booklist. First, they could select and organize books based on an overarching theme their students would find appealing and that was tied to the curriculum (example 1). As an alternative, ALSTs could assemble the booklist by genre (example 2, example 3). The district had been working on exploring genre in other professional development work, and the ALSTs were interested in continuing to write curriculum in this area as well. All the readings needed to be accessible to students reading at a third- to fifth-grade level.

The 16 ALSTs in the children’s and adolescent literature course provided us with extraordinary and creative work, which I’d like to share with ROL readers, particularly those working with young adolescents. The table below shows the themes or genres selected by each ALST; links take the reader to the three examples of complete booklists.

Many thanks to the ALSTs, who so willingly gave me permission to include their work in this article.

References

Allington, R.L. (2002). Research on reading/learning disability interventions. In A.E. Farstrup & S.J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (3rd ed., pp. 261-290). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Allington, R.L., & McGill-Franzen, A. (1995). Flunking: Throwing good money after bad. In R.L. Allington & S.A. Walmsley (Eds.), No quick fix: Rethinking literacy programs in America (pp. 45-59). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Duffy-Hester, A.M. (1999). Teaching struggling readers in elementary school classrooms: A review of classroom reading programs and principles for instruction. The Reading Teacher, 52, 480-495.
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Fountas, I.C., & Pinnell, G.S. (1999). Matching books to readers: Using leveled books in guided reading, K-3. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann.
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Pikulski, J.J. (1994). Preventing reading failure: A review of five effective programs. The Reading Teacher, 48(1), 30-39.
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Smith, M.L., & Shepard, L.A. (1987).What doesn’t work: Explaining policies of retention in the early grades. Phi Delta Kappan, 69(2), 129-134.
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Vacca, R.T. (1998). Let’s not marginalize adolescent literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 41(8), 604-628.
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Vacca, R.T. (2002). Making a difference in adolescents’ school lives: Visible and invisible aspects of content area reading. In A.E. Farstrup & S.J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (3rd ed., pp.184-204). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Citation: Grisham, D.L. (2002, September). Mixing it up in middle school: Themed booklists to entice struggling adolescent readers. Reading Online, 6(2). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/editorial/edit_index.asp?HREF=september2002/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted September 2002
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232